Before jumping on to anything, I wanted to understand if it really is a real problem or just something that only I feel. So I did some research to dig out some data around group ordering. Here is what I found:

As customers spend more time with their families, group ordering has become more relevant than ever. Order sizes, i.e. items per order, have increased by 20% over pre-COVID levels. Recovery on single person meals, which constituted nearly ~60% of all orders pre-COVID, lingers at 50-70% level for most regions. On the other hand, orders with meals for 3 or more persons have recovered well and are higher than even pre-COVID levels currently.

With lockdown restrictions, celebrations have moved back home. Festivals and occasions such as Raksha Bandhan, Janmashtami, Teacher’s Day, and Independence Day saw a massive spike in orders. Customers, who had not ordered since the first day of lockdown, are 20% more likely to order for the first time during such festivals and occasions

But before jumping straight into solutioning the user experience for this feature, I wanted to validate the team’s hypothesis and also learn about the current user behaviour.

I interviewed two of my friends to understand more on current process of bulk order behaviour in different case scenarios - 

With the help of user empathy mapping, I recognized some major pain points that people face today when ordering with a group of people.

Based on analysing the user insights & conclusions, i come up with some of the use cases when building the group ordering flow

1. Having Lunch/Dinner with Family

2. Ordering with coworkers on a hectic work day

3. Parties at Own/Friends house

4. Hosting House warming parties

1. How to bring everyone in one place for ordering the food ?

2. How to decide the quantity, budget, and cuisine ?

3. What if someone in the group doesn't use the zomato app?

4. What if someone don't want to order?

5. How to decide from which restaurant to order?

6. How do the hosts know when to order?

7. How will payment be happening ?

8. How will tracking of the order be shared with the group?

The purpose is to solve the problem where users can place bulk orders with their friends, family, colleagues, or team in a few clicks on their mobile phones and it is easy to understand and informative about the options and choices the user has. This has 2 sub-problems:

1. Taking zomato app as a platform and following their UI guidelines

2. Host is adding restaurants to the group
3. Host is making the full payment and there is no provision for split payment
4. Host is making the final choice of quantity and users are stating their intentions on which dish to add

5. Delivery partner will not have to wait at different restaurants to pick up orders

6. Single delivery partner is delivering the orders

7. Payment done by the host (no splitting of money)

8. All the items on the restaurant menu are tax inclusive

- This flow can have 2 options as mention in above image
- Via Group creation card on 'Order' tab - This option induces minimum friction in the current flow of Zomato.
- Via Group tab on the bottom nav - This puts the group into direct focus. This is recommended when the group order is a widely used feature or Zomato wants to showcase it
- Host will also have to specify a time limit as well till which suggestions will be accepted from users. This is important as the order needs to be completed in a given time frame for the actual order to arrive

As soon as the group is created, the Host can select restaurants to Add to the group from which users can order
- Selected restaurants are shown in a grid on the top
- Restaurants which are shown in 'browse' are the ones which can be nearby to selected restaurants and can be served by the delivery boy in 1 go
- [Future] We can open restaurant selection to users as well but need to solve the extent of rights which users and hosts have. This will need to be controlled by the host as ordering from the fixed place is a valid use case for users (corporate)

1. Split Payment

2. Single item cancel

3. Connect group via nearby or group hotspot

4. Adding another host

5. Guest invite other friends for the order

6. Split food item Quantity